The French designer took inspiration from Rio de Janeiro, where the Cruise 2017 collection was debuted

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It looks like something from a fantasy world. The Niterói Contemporary Art Museum, designed by architect Oscar Niemeyer in 1996, appears to have landed in the Brazilian landscape like a shimmering white UFO, and yet seamlessly unfurls its rolling paths and entrances, easily entangling itself in the soil and earth of Rio de Janeiro.

It is this fantastical idealism that inspired Louis Vuitton’s latest collection. Designer Nicolas Ghesquière expresses the dichotomy and conflict of the natural world and civilization in Cruise 2017. Capturing the vitality, energy and dynamic feeling of Rio, the collection unites urban futurism and the Brazilian wild with slashed stripes, wrapped skirts and embroidered layers.

Nicolas immersed himself in Brazilian culture, and the influences of the Brazilian art scene is evident in the final collection. Artist and sculptor Helio Oiticica, famous for the Neo-Concrete movement, focused on the use of space in his work, and the effect of light and dark. It is this principle that Nicholas explores, and his own interpretation manifests in Cruise 2017. The floral designs of Nordeste painter Aldemir Martins are similarly reworked into the collection as a tribute to the Brazilian landscape.

It seems fitting that the collection is debuted in Neimeyer's wistful modern marvel: the museum played host to the French designer’s vision, proving to be a marvelous backdrop to the daring collection. “I so admire the power of Oscar Niemeyer’s conviction,” says Nicolas. “His vision, his radicality, his utopia even. Being able to show a fashion collection in such an architecturally powerful space is a sensorial experience. In Rio de Janeiro, what I saw most of all was movement and an explosive energy that lives somewhere between modernism and tropicality. I was fascinated by the constant duality between nature and urbanism and the pictorial explosion it creates. For me, the main question was how to incorporate into my collection all these elements that are part of Brazilian culture, without forgetting that I am just a visitor who brings his own Parisian and French cultural references to the moment.” 


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